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Street Lights in Small Town Life

There really wasn’t much to do in my Dad’s home town. The town was small. Not small like a hundred people – all of them related – small. But small enough that everyone knew everyone else (which, needless to say, wasn’t always a good thing).

The town essentially had one intersection, whose four corners were the combined pharmacy/post office, the church, the abandoned building, and the corner of a vacant lot. Other than Perley’s one-pumper service station down the road there really wasn’t any other place to “hang out,” at least not anywhere that you could see anything move. Weeknights were pretty much for doing chores after school until you were dead tired. But weekends were another matter. Friday night was usually the football game at the high school, and Sunday night was usually booked doing the weekend homework we had avoided doing up to that point. Which left Saturday night as the only night for “excitement.”

By the end of the game people started thinking about the weekend, even though the weekend didn’t start until whatever point on Saturday afternoon you had finished feeding the farm animals or cut the four-foot high weeds out of what was supposed to be the family garden. But Saturday night was the night to party.

But party is such as relative concept, don’t you think. To some, party means music and dancing, or at least drinking and flirting with both of the girls not already spoken for by the invariably large members of the football team. To others, party meant a handful of kids hanging out and talking about stuff (this was before iPhones, iPods, or even Walkmen). The local constable and his deputies would herd any teenager out after dark into the center of town where they could keep an eye on them (and drag any “free thinkers” by the ear back to their parents for a whooping). Usually the gang would congregate while it was still light because the main event happened at dusk, that period of the day where natural light starts to fade as the sun dips below the horizon (or old man Johnson’s general store during certain times of year).

And that’s when the street lights come on.

Yes, the town had street lights. The state made the town fathers (no women allowed) install lights because the main road was a pass-through from the slightly bigger small towns on either side of this one. A line of street lights led into town up to the intersection, and another line led out of town going out the other side. The lead-in stretch was straight for a good ½ mile and the road going out was almost twice that. Thanks to the state edict, street lights lined the whole way. It was a beautiful sight.

For those of you who may have more interesting things to do on Saturday night, like go to the real movie theater, you may not have noticed that street lights don’t just come on all at once. These were fluorescent back in their unperfected days and thus seemed to have a mind of their own. They did have these cool photoelectric sensors that sensed ambient brightness and turned the light on when darkness reached some predetermined level. Because the sunlight was uneven (lights to the east received less sunlight than those closer to the west as the sun set), the lights would tend to come on in linear sequence. More or less. That’s not to say that the sensors were all calibrated to the same sensitivity, and other factors like cloudiness and the flashing neon light from Johnson’s store (“Open every day but Sunday”) could throw the sequence out of whack. So every budding scientist (or bored teenager) would take bets on which lights would come on out of order.

But the excitement didn’t stop there. When the sensor triggered the lighting sequence it didn’t just come on like flipping a switch on your overhead lights in the house. No, these lights would come on tentatively, like they were waking up from a long day’s sleep. Groggily opening their eyes to the night but blinded by the remaining flickers of the day, each individual light would awaken at its own pace. So as everyone watched, the street lights would blink.

Blink……..

Blink….

Blink..

Blink, Blink, Blink…….

Blink, Blink, Blink…….

Bzzzzzzzzzz.

That Bzzzzzz was the humming. Mostly the light would stop humming after it got up to full temperature, but some would hum all night. Unless, of course, someone was able to take one out with a well thrown rock.

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7 thoughts on “Street Lights in Small Town Life”

My brother and I would spend a few weeks at my grandparent’s house every summer. The big entertainment night for us was Friday. We got to watch and count racing cars come by on trailers on the way to a location that was a mystery to us. The house was one of those small, country houses that was made uncomfortably close to a 5 lane US highway by virtue of road widening. To boot, the railroad was two houses away on the other side of the house. Dead quiet except for traffic times.

I have not paid attention to street lights for a while. But I do remember a time when there were yellow tinted sodium lights and some white/blue tinted lights that were competing.

This particular small town hasn’t change much at in all these years. It’s still a one intersection town, although the interstate does intersect the outskirts of town as it carries people beyond it without noticing.

As for the train, that runs right behind the house we moved to when I was 13. Worse, that’s where the station is, so the locomotives would sit there idling. The slow rumbling was what put us to sleep at night in my attic room overlooking the tracks. Ah, good times.

I was too straight and narrow (really!) to break street lights, but I admit to tossing rocks into the old barn to arouse the bats in the early evening. Never tried the marshmallow idea. Now I feel obligated to see if the old barn is still standing.

I was happy to move away to college and then move further away to work, although on visits home the old attic bedroom with the view (and sound) of the train station was always there to greet me. The area was supposed to be a “no whistle” zone after a big fight with the town council, but sometimes the engineers would forget. Repeatedly.

I hate to confess this, but I should have better appreciated where I was able to grow up. Kids, I think, just take their environment for granted. In 1980, when I was still quite young, the local beach became “official”. Suddenly, all of the town kids were “life-guards”, because that was a way to get us to at least learn how not to be idiots in the water. Still, in the months at a time when I rarely wore shoes, we’d run barefoot across the forbidden railroad bridge over the river and along the trestle into downtown, or race down the exposed beach below the bluffs to the next town over, barely beating the incoming tides. It was happy and beautiful and exciting, and frightening and dangerous too, and all those things kids should experience. And yet, I couldn’t leave to college soon enough, and I never really looked back.

The old house where I lived for the first five years still looks much the same, but the feeling of the place is different now. The downtown and the beach reflect its newfound status as a tourist destination, and the development extends between towns. And our house at the edge of the forest left the family after my father died, so the connections, save the memories, are gone.

I know how you feel, although not a carefree time, childhood was at least free of responsibility (well, that’s not entirely true, but probably mostly).

I still go back to my home town 2 to 4 times a year where both my parents still live well into their aged years. I love the town to visit – quintessential small New England town – but I’m sure I would be bored silly if I had stayed living there. And poor. I’m not sure what I’ll do after my parents are gone because I have no real friends there any more (ever?), but it’s still my home in some sense.